A 3-Step Process for Activating Project Stakeholders

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The Project Management Institute offers some sobering statistics: Only 26% of projects meet their objectives. Numerous factors contribute to project failure, but one of the most common is ineffective stakeholder management. Too often, project managers fail to include essential stakeholders, don’t take a strategic approach to stakeholder management or communicate with stakeholders ineffectively. Change management experts emphasize the importance of engaging stakeholders appropriately (i.e., in a way that maximizes stakeholders contribution, while minimizing the time commitment) throughout a project’s life cycle.

Stakeholders should be considered an essential part of a project’s success. According to Beverly Tester, stakeholders can be a valuable resource. They can provide ideas, information and opinions vital to a project’s success. More than that, stakeholders can provide direction and resources that will be critical throughout your project.

Casey Halloran, quoted on CIO.com says, “Somebody at the higher levels of the organization needs to own the project from start to finish and be personally vested in its success. When [a project] has no clear head, things tend to fall apart.”

Stakeholder management should be a priority throughout a project so key players have the information and resources they need to help the project along. In addition, working successfully with stakeholders gains their respect and opens opportunities to collaborate with them in the future.

How do you gain stakeholder support and successfully manage stakeholder involvement? We recommend a simple 3-step process.

Step 1: Identify Your Stakeholders & Champions

Before the project begins, it’s critical to know who the project impacts. Ask yourself, “Who has an interest in the outcome of this training?” Your answer could include company executives, consumers, suppliers, your team, employees, your boss, SMEs, IT, marketing, etc. Be sure to consider people who will deliver the training, people the training will affect and others who have an interest in the training.

A careful analysis of your stakeholders will allow you to detect and avoid potential misunderstandings and potential opposition. One benefit of identifying stakeholders is that you will also identify potential project champions. According to smallbiztrends.com, the project champion is a project protector who generates the organizational support and resources necessary for success.

Champions are stakeholders who can work with the project team to ensure the vision is translated successfully, advocate for the project with upper management when concerns are raised, and allocate internal resources for the project.

Step 2: Make a Stakeholder Priority Map

Knowing who your stakeholders and champions are is not enough. You now need to prioritize the contribution of each stakeholder. The goal is to identify your allies and potential opposition so you can create effective strategies for working with both. Identify the relationships, coalitions, conflicts and priorities that will help or impede your project.

Arrange them based on similar needs. Rebecca Merrett at CIO.com warns that grouping stakeholders into broad categories could indicate you don’t understand your stakeholders’ needs and priorities, making it difficult to engage with them effectively

Rank stakeholders based on importance to the project. This step helps you identify how important each stakeholder segment is to the success of the project. Questions to consider when ranking stakeholders include the following:

What is their interest in the project (financial, educational, organization, etc.)?

What do they see as the project’s advantages and disadvantages?

How can they influence project success?

What is the ideal role for each stakeholder? How could s/he best contribute to the project? Beverly Tester offers a useful table here that identifies potential roles of various training project stakeholders.

To gather this information, spend time talking to your stakeholders. Ask them directly about their interest in your project, the level of involvement they’d like to have and the advantages and disadvantages they see with the project. Then use this information to create a map that provides a clear visual overview of your stakeholders.

The stakeholder map below, developed by John Glover at Kahootz, provides a simple framework to categorize stakeholders based on their influence over the project’s outcomes and interest in the project.

Step 3: Develop a Strategy for Collaboration and Communication with Stakeholders

Different stakeholders require different levels of involvement in the project. According to Mira Lose, it’s important to meet these differing needs with a strategic and consistent engagement approach. She recommends conducting a cost-benefit analysis to determine which resources to engage with and how much time to spend on that engagement.

To create consistency, she suggests embedding engagement and communication into everyday business activities, such as management meetings and performance reviews. This means developing a communication framework and communicating consistent messages.

For example, Glover recommends tying your communication and collaboration framework with the stakeholder influence and interest map you created in Step 2.

Glover provides the following matrix for classifying stakeholders:

Here are the strategies he recommends for each stakeholder influence/interest combination:

You may want to expand this framework with a more comprehensive collaboration and communication plan. For example, Mind Tools recommends developing a Stakeholder Communication Worksheet (you can find an example here) at the start of every project that identifies the communication approach you’re planning for each stakeholder, their level of support for the project, the actions you desire from them, the messages you need to communicate to them and more.

By following these 3 simple steps, you will have a strategic and manageable plan for turning project allies into champions and for keeping detractors from derailing your project.

Wrap Up

Change management experts have discovered people are much more likely to accept or advocate for a project if they feel involved in decision making. Maintain ongoing dialogue with stakeholders throughout the project. Don’t aim only for buy-in—encourage your stakeholders’ active involvement in the training project. Make the outcome matter as much to them as it does to you. Also, be sure to include them in the celebrations when the project succeeds!

A last word: Trust is essential to stakeholder management, particularly when your project involves a significant change for your organization. Rebecca Merrett warns that putting an overly positive spin on a project can backfire because it diminishes stakeholder trust. Instead, the project team should be clear about benefits and risks, and identify clearly stakeholders’ role in mitigating these risks and enhancing benefits.

By delivering honest, transparent communication throughout a project, you develop credibility and a positive reputation with your stakeholders. This legacy will serve you now and in future projects.